Choosing a Smart Home Hub

If you really want to make your entire home "smart," you'll eventually need a smart home "hub" or "controller." These hubs act as the brain of your smart home, helping connect your various smart home devices and then sending the commands that make them work together. Hue Lights and Nest Thermostats are fun, but without a hub, they are islands of functionality that will struggle to scale as your smart home matures.

If you don't want to wake-up one day and realize that you're surrounded by "smart" devices that cannot talk to each other, you need a hub. Sooner than later.

So, how do you choose?

There are many options on the market today, at a wide range of price points and capabilities. Before making a specific recommendation, it's important to understand the key characteristics of smart home hubs.

Key characteristics of smart home hubs

All smart home hubs are meant to solve the same problem: connect smart home devices, monitor their status and control these devices with scenes, triggers and commands. There are some important differences in the way different controllers attempt to perform this task, though:

Supported Wireless Standards

Broad vs Limited Device Support

Embedded vs Installed Software

Cloud vs Local Processing

Supported Wireless Standards

For years, smart homes have required hard-wired connections that can only be added at the time of construction. Wired solutions provide unparalleled reliability, but if you're in one of the millions of homes built without this wiring, smart homes have simply been out-of-reach.

Legacy solutions, like X10, tried to overcome this limit by enabling smart home communication over existing power lines, but these solutions were notoriously difficult to setup and maintain.

New, modern wireless protocols have changed the game, though, and finally make wireless home automation (reasonably) reliable and easy to setup. The most popular of these modern protocols are:

ZWave

ZigBee

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

Wifi

Of these protocols, ZWave and ZigBee are tailored to the smart home task. Both are mesh networking technologies, meaning every new device you add to your smart home expands the reach and strength of the wireless network. This is a big advantage over Wifi's "hub and spoke" network model, where everything must talk to the wifi access point. ZWave and ZigBee are also low-power protocols, making them ideal for battery-powered devices.

Bluetooth may become a more popular choice in the future when if the nascent Bluetooth mesh networking protocol is widely adopted. For now, Bluetooth's limited range makes it impractical for large smart home setups.

Between ZWave and ZigBee, ZWave offers better compatibility between hubs and devices thanks to its proprietary nature. ZigBee is an open standard, but has struggled to maintain compatibility between manufacturers. If I had to spend money on devices today, I'd buy ZWave for maximum compatibility assurance.

(In fact, nowadays there is a ZWave Plus protocol that makes ZWave devices even more powerful (67% more range), power friendly (50% more battery life) and maintainable (support for wireless firmware updates). Fortunately, "classic" ZWave and ZWave Plus devices work fine together.)

There are other protocols, of course.

Insteon is an evolution of the old X10 protocol, traveling both over powerlines and wirelessly. Ideal primarily in homes where a lot of X10 hardware already exists.

Lutron, popular provider of light switches and window coverings (both "traditional" and "smart'), has their own RF protocols that some (but not many) hubs support, including their own proprietary Caseta hubs.

Finally, Nest (now owned by Google) created the Thread protocol in 2014, but so far there is very limited support outside of the Nest products.

Bottom line: Make sure you pick a hub that supports the standards you need to work with your smart home devices. And if you have a choice, choose ZWave and then ZigBee for the maximum benefits of range and battery life.

(FUN FACT: Hue Lights use the ZigBee standard, though Philips uses a custom command structure, so the Hue ZigBee hub does not work with many other ZigBee devices. A perfect example of how ZigBee struggles to foster predictable interoperability.)

Broad vs Limited Device Support

"What? My hub supports ZWave. I thought I could use any ZWave device, no problem."

If only it were so simple. Supported wireless protocols ensure your devices and hub can talk to eachother, but the hub must still know what to do with those signals for specific devices. Just like Windows needs device drivers to know how to use a USB device, a smart home hub needs (effectively) a "driver" that supports your connected device before it can make proper use of it.

If only it were so, again. While many hubs do try to offer maximum device support, especially for common smart home devices, some hubs choose to limit support to "approved" devices. In theory, these hubs are trying to incubate a more "controlled," walled garden setup, but in reality they are severely limiting your ability to expand your smart home.

Think about it. There are HUNDREDS of things you could possibly connect to a smart home, like:

Door and window sensors

Switches

Dimmers

Outlets

Window shade controllers

Media center/AV controllers

Door locks

Garage door openers

Water sensors

Sirens

Cameras

And on, and on, and ...

The more flexibility your hub offers, the more choice you'll have to shop for the devices that matter most to your smart home priorities, and that fit your smart home budget.

Lowe's Iris and GE's Wink are two culprits often criticized for weak device support and limited APIs that prohibit the hobbyist community to expand support independently (though, to be fair, the Wink v2 hub seems to be MUCH better and more extensible than Wink v1).

Insteon hubs offer limited support, too, by predominantly focusing on their own wireless protocols instead of embracing the large community of ZWave and ZigBee devices.

Bottom line: If you want the freedom to pick-and-choose your smart home devices, make sure your hub offers broad device support and features an open API that enables others to freely extend the built-in support.

Cloud vs Local Processing

In an effort to provide more powerful computing power at a lower price, some smart home hubs offload their processing to servers in the cloud. The hub in these cases acts as a "dumb" proxy, relaying commands between smart devices in your house and the cloud.

While a powerful option when it works, this approach has the distinct drawback of tying the availability of your smart home to your internet connection. And unless you're hardwired to 100% reliable internet, that means you can look forward to motion sensors not turning on lights when the internet goes out.😡

Meanwhile, hubs like Vera do all processing locally, making the impact of Internet blips far less painful to the smart home experience.

Cloud processing also tends to bring monthly subscription fees with your hub, so be prepared to pay to keep it working. To recap, with cloud processing:

The reliability of your smart home is tied to the reliability of your internet 😳

If the cloud backing your hub does down, so does your house

If you stop paying the subscription fees, your smart home stops working

Bottom line: For a reliable smart home, prefer local processing.

Embedded vs Installed Software

Many smart home hubs come as a packaged unit: the software and hardware are sold together and there is no way to run the software on different hardware.

There are smart home systems, though, that provide the software and let you BYOH (Bring Your Own Hardware). These systems usually install on Windows, Linux or macOS machines, and then you use USB dongles to add the requisite radios for talking to ZWave, ZigBee or whatever devices you want. The advantage of this approach is that you can create a smart home hub that is as powerful as your installation demands, or even reuse an existing always-on computer in your home to power your system.

Popular "BYOH" smart home systems include:

HomeSeer (Commercial, Win/Linux)

Indigo Domotics (Commercial, Mac)

openHAB (Open Source, Win/Linux/Mac)

Embedded systems are certainly more plug-and-play, and typically they are simpler to manage. Think of it as console gaming vs PC gaming. The downside is that these tiny, plug-and-play smart home hubs cannot be easily upgrade, and under the covers are usually relatively modest computing capabilities.

Bottom line: If you plan to have a large smart home installation (say, more than 75 to 100 devices), you may prefer the ability to throw more RAM at your smart home hub to keep it running fast as it processes a higher volume of messages, triggers and scenes. In those cases, consider a server-based, installable smart home system.

The Hub Options

Now that you thoroughly understand some of the key characteristics that make smart home hubs different, let's see how the options available on the market today compare on these criteria:

SmartThings (Gen2)

Vera Plus

Iris (v2)

Wink Hub (v2)

HomeKit

HomeSeer

Lutron Caseta

Indigo

Zipato

Fibaro

Supported Protocols:

ZWave

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

ZigBee

X

X

X

X

X

X

WiFi

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

BLE

X

X

X

X

X

Insteon

X

X

Lutron

X

X

X

Extensible/Open API

X

X

X

X

X

X

Local processing

Some

X

Some

X

X

X

X

X

X

Cloud processing

X

X

X

Requires monthly fee

X

Embedded

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Upgradable hardware

X

Runs on Mac

Limited

Pricing

$99

$149

$59

$99

$149

$199+

$59

$300+

$199+

$300+

Clearly, there is lots of choice in today's market, and though many of these controllers look the same in a simple comparison like this, the devil is in the details. In my experience, the size and vibrancy of the community around a smart home hub is as important as what comes in the box. Smart homes are constantly evolving machines, and active communities help ensure your hub doesn't fall behind the curve as new devices arrive.

Which hub should you buy?

That's hard to say. There is no definitive right or wrong choice, but if I were to offer "Editor's Picks," I'd suggest the following:

For best balance of power and ease of use: Go Vera

For the best out-of-the-box experience: Go SmartThings v2 or Wink v2

For the most control over hardware: Go HomeSeer

What about high-end systems like Savant, Control4 and Crestron?

There are a myriad of high-end smart home systems not covered here that are only available via professional installers. These systems are usually put in high-end homes and businesses, and are typically part of new construction (or major remodeling). As a result, costs are typically much higher, too. The focus of this post (and site in general) is more squarely on systems anyone can buy and install. The so-called "DIY" or "retrofit" smart home.

But yes, there are other high-end options, including Savant, Control4, Elan, and Crestron.

What about HomeKit, Alexa and Google Home?

Ah, yes. The newest kids on the block, from the biggest companies in tech. Smart home support in Apple's HomeKit, Amazon's Alexa and Google's Home is really a "control" layer on top of other smart home technologies and hubs. None of these products include the necessary radios for communicating locally over the popular smart home protocols (ZWave, ZigBee), and as a result, can generally only communicate with the cloud APIs provided by select smart home devices.

In fact, if you wanted to use HomeKit or Alexa with a complete smart home, you'd start with a traditional hub (as discussed in this article) and then simply use Alexa or HomeKit/Siri to issue commands to the hub.

So don't be confused. These systems are great, but they're not the foundation of complete smart home installation.

Hope this guidance helps. Have fun building your smart home, and let us know which hub you picked!

Todd writes about smart home living and technology, with a particular focus on wireless "DIY" smart homes. He has worked as a graphic designer, software developer and held various executive roles at professional software development companies. Todd speaks frequently at software developer conferences, and is the creator of Invisible: Controller.